Metamorphosis Franz Kafka Translated by David Wyllie I One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.

Franz Kafka -- Metamorphosis

The transformations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses show up in all sorts of later works, not least in Franz Kafka’s story of a man who wakes up one morning to find he’s changed into an enormous beetle.

Thomas C. Foster -- How to Read Literature Like a Professor

FRANZ KAFKA IS DEAD He died in a tree from which he wouldn’t come down.

Nicole Krauss -- The History of Love

Franz Kafka, a latter-day Poe, uses the dynamic in stories like "The Metamorphosis" (1915) and "A Hunger Artist" (1924), where, in a nifty reversal of the traditional vampire narrative, crowds of onlookers watch as the artist’s fasting consumes him.

Thomas C. Foster -- How to Read Literature Like a Professor

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Like Franz Kafka’s Hunger Artist, Fevvers has a gift that places her in a cage: her flights are containedindoors, her world is a stage where even the fourth wall is a barrier, since she is so different from her audience that she cannot freely join them.

Thomas C. Foster -- How to Read Literature Like a Professor

Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, and T. Coraghessan Boyle are only a few of those twentieth-century masters of the ironic stance.

Thomas C. Foster -- How to Read Literature Like a Professor

In addition to Keats and the Brontes, Robert Louis Stevenson, Katherine Mansfield, Lawrence, Frederic Chopin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Franz Kafka, and Percy Bysshe Shelley form a fair beginning toward a Who’s Who of artistic consumptives.